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Halo in Miniature

Is Master Chief as intimidating when he's one inch tall and made of plastic?

Mark Tuttle looks like a happy guy. No reason he shouldn't be, of course. He works for WizKids, a company that produces the very successful series of "ActionClix" collectible miniatures games. He's at GenCon surrounded by 60,000 gamers marching through his booth at a rate of about 20 per minute and he's the only one who's got the key to open the display case where a large plastic model of the Scarab from Halo 3 is being held. We're sitting at a table covered by a tiled map and in front of us are small plastic figures that are very recognizable to anyone who's even picked up a videogame in the last few years. There's an Arbiter with dual needlers next to a blue Spartan with a BR55 Battle Rifle and there's the man himself, Master Chief, looking fly in green armor and only an inch or so tall.

"It's all about immersion," Tuttle said as we sat down to try out the new Halo ActionClix game and talk about how, after years of videogames plucking IPs and concepts from the tabletop world, that world is now returning the favor by licensing and producing physical versions of videogame hits. "Think about a die-hard Yankees fan. If they really love the team, they want to immerse themselves in the experience -- buy a jersey, get a mug with a logo on it, and put team bobbleheads in their office, that kind of thing." According to Tuttle, gamers are much the same, but it hasn't been until recently that game companies, realizing the power of the worlds they produce, have rushed to fill that hole in the market.

"Halo is such an amazing world," he continued. "There's Master Chief, of course, he's the heart of Halo, but there's so much more to it than that. There's Spartans and Scarabs and cool aliens and great weapons." According to Tuttle, the team at WizKids always thought that there was great potential in their "ActionClix" system to offer gamers a new way to experience the Halo universe, but that didn't mean it was an easy sell. "We had to convince the guys over at Bungie," Tuttle said. "We had to let them know that we had something that would do justice to the game experience they had built."

The key to getting the license was not just carving up some foam models and attaching it to their already existing ActionClix system. The WizKids team first started by playing the first two games in the series a lot and then really pulling them apart, trying to figure out what made the videogame experience so compelling. "Halo has two basic ways to play," Tuttle said. "You can play through the single-player and experience sort of the story version of Halo or you can get in there and mix it up in PvP." In the end, it was the PvP Halo experience they would try to emulate and that would mean making quite a few alterations to the basic structure of an ActionClix game.